Webkit vs. Mozilla: Should Firefox jump on the Webkit bandwagon?

As the Mozilla folks start making plans to plan for the Mozilla 2 codebase, Matt Gertner over at the AllPeers blog has a radical suggestion: Dump the Gecko rendering engine and embrace WebKit.

According to Gertner, innovation in the area of “desktop-enabled web applications” would be accelerated “considerably if the open source world were to adopt a standard architectural stack for the web client, analogous to LAMP on the server side.” Further, Gertner says that the logical choices of “core components” include “WebKit, Tamarin and SQLite.” (Tamarin is a work-in-progress implementation of the ECMAScript 4th Edition language spec.)

Gertner’s post has a good rundown of the pro and con arguments for/against adopting WebKit in Mozilla. I don’t know if the WebKit idea will be taken seriously by the Moz folks, but — from the user’s perspective — I think it might be best for users in the long run if Mozilla, Apple, the KDE folks, and other projects could all agree on a single technology.

This would be particularly good for Linux users, since we benefit greatly from Web-based applications that are compatible with Firefox and other Linux-compatible browsers. Why write for one OS when you can write for Firefox and enable users on all three major platforms? It would make life much easier for Web developers if Safari and Firefox shared the same code for rendering HTML, CSS, and running JavaScript.

But, the desire to cooperate would have to overcome the dreaded Not Invented Here (NIH) syndrome, and I’m not sure that’s likely.